Intel canceled quite a few tablet and smartphone products from its roadmap but it is clear that it still needs a successor to Atom – the Apollo Lake product generation.

Intel launched the first Apollo Lake products in Q3 2016 and branded them as Pentium J Celeron J, Pentium N and Celeron N and later in Q4 2016 roughly a year from then it followed up with Intel Atom x7-E3950 Processor and at the high end, Intel Atom x5 and Intel Atom x3 processors.

Intel is targeting the €199 - €299 notebook/ 2 in 1/tablet market with the widely available Atom X5s. This will get replaced by the Gemini Lake generation. Gemini Lake is also known as the Goldmont plus. As the name implies this is still a 14nm improved design and not really a new architecture.

We don’t need to remind you that Intel is having trouble stepping down from 14nm manufacturing to 10nm but apparently this will happen at least for some devices in the course of 2018. Unfortunately, not for the Pentium X7/Celeron X5 previously known as Atom System on a chip. The good news is that the new 14nm++ - which is how Intel sometimes calls it, should be able to get you some additional 10 percent performance over the previous generation.

Our well placed sources suggest that there might be some Gemini Lake device announced in Q1 2018, but it is most likely that they will ship in the latter part of the quarter or in Q2 2018 in serious volumes. To refresh your memory, Gemini Lake is a quad core system on a chip targeting 4W and 6W TDP notebooks, two in ones and tablets mostly based on Windows 10. Intel calls this product bracket the Pentium N. The first leak out of Hong Kong surfaced a month ago, but Intel has yet to officialy announce the Gemini Lake SoC platform.

Chipzilla has released a few details on its Atom C3000, and unlike previous flavours of Atom these are being tipped for the network rather than home use.

Earlier in the week Gigabyte launched a new server motherboard that came packing a previously unannounced Intel Atom C3958 16-core 2.0GHz processor. Hexus points out that this product launch was a little ahead of Intel’s own announcement of the chip range, which was done today.

The processors are designed for light scale-out workloads that require very low power, high density, and high I/O integration including network routers, switches, storage, security appliances, dynamic web serving, and more.

Chipzilla says that the Intel's Atom C3000 series SoCs are designed to deliver "low power, efficient intelligence, to the farthest edge of the network," They will start to appear in Network and Enterprise Storage products.

Intel claims they can deliver up to 4.0x storage performance improvement, up to 3.4x network performance improvement, and up to 2.3x compute performance improvement

The C3000 series are the third-generation system-on-a-chip based CPUs manufactured on Intel's optimized 14nm process technology.

At the top end Intel offers the Atom C3958 with 16-cores and running at 2.0GHz at $449. This 31W processor can use up to 256GB of RAM and can support 8x USB 3.0 ports, 16 SATA ports, and offers 4x10/2.5/1GbE LAN. Here is the list:

Chipzilla wasted a fortune trying to arrive into the smartphone chip making business too late, and not it looks like it will have to shell out a bit more to make its mess go away.

A Brazilian phone seller claims some of those poor selling mobile chips were defective. Qbex Computadores is suing intel in the US charging that thousands of phones it sold containing Intel's SoFIA chipset caught fire due to overheating from design defects.

Qbex says 35,000 customers complained and 4,000 have filed lawsuits in Brazil. In the lawsuit, which seeks damages of at least $100 million, Qbex alleges that Intel committed fraud and misrepresented the quality of the SoFIA chips.

Intel denies that it was its fault but it is reviewing the allegations in the complaint and will investigate them thoroughly.

"However, we have no evidence to suggest that the overheating issues Qbex alleges were caused by our product."

Qbex struck a deal with Intel to sell generic smartphones made in China with Intel's low-end mobile chipset, SoFIA. The new phones had Qbex's logo and an "Intel Inside" sticker.

Intel killed off SoFIA and related versions of its Atom line of processors, last year ending a multi-billion dollar fiasco.

According to the lawsuit, Intel (officials promised Qbex that "Intel was responsible for the design and quality of the products its (original design manufacturer) and system integrator partners manufactured and Intel had several supervising technicians working directly at their factories to ensure compliance with Intel's standards and designs."

Qbex also said its own testing revealed some of the Intel phones were operating at elevated temperatures compared to other phone models. But the third-party manufacturer told Qbex the higher temperature was acceptable and Intel assured the company that it would review the issue.

But by the third quarter of 2016, complaints had skyrocketed and by December, Qbex thought it was not worth the hassle and stopped selling them.

Big Blue boffins have managed to read and write data to a single atom.

While this has been managed before, a single atomic storage technique did not actually store data in the atom, but just moved them around to form readable patterns.

This means that imbuing individual atoms with a 0 or 1 is the next major step forward and the next major barrier in storing data digitally, both increasing capacity by orders of magnitude and presenting a new challenge to engineers and physicists.

The new method uses a Holmium atom which is large and has lots of unpaired electrons which is placed on a bed of magnesium oxide.

In this configuration, the atom has magnetic bistability and two stable magnetic states with different spins.

IBM used a scanning tunnelling microscope to apply about 150 millivolts at 10 microamps to the atom. This huge influx of electrons causes the Holmium atom to switch its magnetic spin state.

Because the two states have different conductivity profiles, the STM tip can detect which state the atom is in by applying a lower voltage (about 75 millivolts) and sensing its resistance.

The experiment created a lasting, stored magnetic state in a single atom that can be detected indirectly. One atom could be used to store what amounts to a 0 or a 1. The experimenters made two of them and to form the four binary combinations (00,01,10,11) that two such nodes can form.

Not sure what use this would have but it is certainly more productive than stitching an ear onto the back of a mouse.

As Intel's Atom division gets buried under a scandal over its C2000s only having an 18 month life expectancy, Chipzilla has released its new Atom CPU 3000 range to replace it.

To be fair to Intel, the C3000 is a superior product. At the top end it will have 16 core CPUs which are designed for enterprise servers. According to Intel they will have features borrowed from the Xeon line, such as hardware virtualization, and RAS (reliability, availability, and serviceability).

These chips will head to the NAS and IoT markets and they can deal with several parallel data streams. Not as fast as Kaby Lake and Broadwell, they will be placed as reliable workhorses in the network. That is if they don't repeat the problems of the flawed C2000 Atom series of products. These had quality control issues, which Intel claims that it has fixed.

The new line is scheduled to launch in the second half of 2017. The Intel ARK shows a dual-core Atom C3338 with Denverton cores fabbed at 14nm. That SoC will get a 1.5 Ghz base frequency and 2.2 Ghz boost.

Each pair of Denverton cores will have two megabytes of level two cache. The new chips support for up to 128 gigabytes of DDR4-2400 memory and thus include support for 10Gb Ethernet as well as 16 lanes of PCI-Express 3.0 connectivity. Here are the highlights.

Thermal design points down to 8.5 watts.

Enhanced performance from 2 to 16 cores and frequencies from 1.5 Ghz to 2.2 Ghz.

It is starting to look like Intel’s Atom C2000 chip fiasco has spread to another networking manufacturer.

The fatal clock timing flaw that causes switches, routers and security appliances die after about 18 months of service is apparently a feature of some Juniper products.

Cisco was the first vendor to post a notice about the problem earlier this month saying the notice covers some of the company’s most widely deployed products, such as certain models of its Series 4000 Integrated Services Routers, Nexus 9000 Series switches, ASA security devices and Meraki Cloud Managed Switches.

Juniper is telling its customers something similar:

“Although we believe the Juniper products with this component are performing normally as of February 13, 2017, the [listed] Juniper products could after the product has been in operation for at least 18 months begin to exhibit symptoms such as the inability to boot, or cease to operate. Recovery in the field is not possible. Juniper product with this supplier’s component were first placed into service on January 2016. Jupiter is working with the component supplier to implement a remediation. In addition, Juniper’s spare parts depots will be purged and updated with remediated products.”

So far neither Cisco nor Juniper have blamed Intel for the fault. However, Chipzilla did describe a flaw on its Atom C2000 chip which is under the bonnet of shedloads of net gear.

Intel said that problems with its Atom chip will hurt Intel’s 2016 Q4 earnings. CFO Robert Swan said that Intel was seeing a product quality issue in the fourth quarter with slightly higher expected failure rates under certain use and time constraints.

Swan said that it will be fixed with a minor design fix that Intel was working with its clients to resolve.

Intel had hoped it would see the back of its short-lived low-power Atom chips for servers. They were used in micro servers but also networking equipment from companies.

HPE and Dell are keeping quiet about the clock technology, though both are rumoured to use it. They might be hoping that Intel will come up with a fix so they can pretend it never happened.

One of the world’s most popular chipsets for gigabit broadband modems, Intel's Puma 6 chipset, suffers from at latency jitter so bad it ruins online gaming and other real-time connections.

Apparently, Intel knows about the problem and is preparing a firmware update to correct spikes of lag and bouts of packet loss that repeatedly flare up in home internet hubs.

Of course there is nothing to make sure that you have this chipset - your ISP will push it out but you should look out for a firmware update and modem reboot coming your way.

The list of modems powered by Intel's Puma 6 chipset is legion. There are the Arris Surfboard SB6190, the Hitron CGNV4, and the Compal CH7465-LG. Some ISPs even rebadge them like Virgin Media's Superhub 3 and Comcast's top-end Xfinity boxes. It is also under the bonnet of some Linksys and Cisco routers.

Intel bought the Puma family of chips from TI in 2010. It made sense as a good way of getting its chips out there. For example, the DOCSIS 3.0-compatible Puma 6 has an Atom x86 processor. This is where the problem comes from. Intel forgot to reconfigure the x86 software to handle routers properly. So the CPU in the modem is taking on too much work while processing network packets. When this happens a high-priority maintenance task runs and takes over the processor, causing latency to increase by at least 200ms.

This means that six percent of packets are dropped. It makes internet gaming and other online real-time interaction useless. The bug has been getting more noticeable since Puma 6-powered modems started shipping in large numbers.

Intel has been showing off its next generation of its Atom microprocessors intended for the Internet of Things (IoT).

According to Chipzilla, the Intel Atom E3900 series has been designed from the ground up, and based around the 14-nanometer process chip manufacturing. As a result it has 1.7 times the compute power over older Atoms and can support faster memory speeds and greater memory bandwidth.

Ken Caviasca, vice president of Intel's Internet of Things group and general manager of platform engineering and development, said that the chip has been built into a compact flip chip ball grid array (FCBGA). It is designed for those moments where scalable performance, space and power are tricky – like the Internet of Things.

The Intel Atom can manage 3D graphics - improved by 2.9 times compared to the previous Atom generation - and can support three independent displays.

The Atom was originally designed to power netbooks so they had some video thrown into the mix. The new E3900 series has four vector image processing units, resulting in better visibility, quality video in low light, noise reduction, and colour and detail preservation.

One of the more important parts of the chip is the ability to keep devices synchronised via the Intel Time Coordinated Computing feature.

"By synchronising clocks inside the system-on-a-chip and across the network, Intel Time Coordinated Computing Technology can achieve network accuracy to within a microsecond," Caviasca said.

Dutch boffins have worked out how to create an atomic scale rewritable data-storage device capable of packing 500 terabits onto a single square inch.

That is enough to store most readers porn collections in just a couple of feet of data rather than the rooms it takes up now. Apparently you can stuff the entire contents of the US Library of Congress in a 0.1-mm wide cube -- we guess that does not include the toilets and the cafe..

The atomic hard drive was developed by Delft University's Sander Otte and his chums. It features a storage density that’s 500 times larger than state-of-the-art hard disk drives.

According to the latest issue of Nature Nanotechnology, which we get for the impossible spot the proton competition, the technology is not exactly commercial yet.

Otte and the team placed chlorine atoms on a copper surface, resulting in a perfect square grid. A hole appears on this grid whenever an atom is missing. Using a sharp needle of a scanning tunneling microscope, the researchers were able to probe the atoms one by one, and even drag individual atoms towards a hole.

When a chlorine atom is in the top position, and there’s a hole beneath it, it’s a 1. Reversed, the bit is a 0. and it becomes a hard drive.

Each chlorine atom is surrounded by other chlorine atoms, which helps keep them in place, except near the holes. This method makes it much more stable than methods that use loose atoms. Using this technique, the researchers were able to perform write, read-out, and re-write operations in a one-kilobyte device comprising 8,000 atomic bits. It is by far the largest atomic structure ever constructed by humans.

During the experiment, the researchers preserved the positions of more than 8,000 chlorine “vacancies,” or missing atoms, for more than 40 hours at 77 kelvin. After developing a binary alphabet based on the positions of the holes, the researchers stored various texts, including physicist Richard Feynman’s seminal lecture, There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom, and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. This data was stored atom by atom, bit by bit, on the surface of the copper sheet. The ensuing write/re-write speed was relatively slow—on the scale of minutes—but the demonstration showed that it’s possible to reliably write, store, and read data at the atomic scale.

The system cannot function in an everyday environment. In its current form, the atomic hard drive can only operate in clean vacuum conditions and at liquid nitrogen temperatures, which is -346°F (-321°C). Most readers porn collections are far too hot for it to handle.